Editor’s note: Frasca Food and Wine in Boulder, owned by master sommelier Bobby Stuckey and chef Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson, turns 10 this year. Frasca won a James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Wine Program in 2013. We asked Stuckey to share his thoughts on what makes a restaurant welcoming to diners.
Hospitality means making a guest feel at home in our restaurant. It doesn’t matter if it’s their first time at Frasca or their 100th time. Hospitality is about creating an atmosphere where everything is taken care of and feels effortless — like the action in the dining room is just happening naturally.
But here’s a secret: It doesn’t happen naturally. And this skill set doesn’t come naturally to many people in the industry.
One of the great challenges I work on every day as a front-of-house leader is getting our staff — not just the front, but also the back of house — to think about how to make our guests feel at home in our restaurant.
Service and hospitality should be honed, like a craft, in both casual and fine-dining restaurants.
Both have their challenges. With fine dining, the stakes are higher, and the moves needed for service have to feel more natural, much like a gymnast performing a routine with higher difficulty levels in front of a panel of judges.
While parents now cheer when their child goes to culinary school, few cheer when they go into the service industry. Every major city has culinary schools, but there are few programs across the country dedicated to the service aspect of the restaurant industry. Magazines, publications, television and movies focus on the back of the house: the chef.
There are fewer true front-of-house leaders, and many chef-owners have focused entirely on the kitchen without spending resources, time or energy thinking about their vision for great service.
I love it when my chef’s peers ask him about starting their own restaurant and his first piece of advice is to find a front-of-house business partner. Their shock continually surprises me when they respond: “Really, is that what I need to do?” and how few of them actually do it. The chefs who have heeded that advice are far more successful than the ones who have not.
The restaurant industry is filled with people who might not have chosen this profession. A few of us are born to take care of other people, but many people got into the business to make a living and do not necessarily have what we refer to as the restaurant “gene.”
As hospitality leaders, our job is to teach people how to turn on that “gene” night after night. It’s a challenging discipline and one that we work on daily. We talk about it, learn from our mistakes and turn them into positives.
At Frasca, we focus on empathy during pre-service meetings, so that the whole staff is more attuned to what the guests are going through when they walk in the door. We talk about the minutiae of a beautiful service, one that looks effortless but every detail has been thought about in advance and talked through in detail.
Say a guest gets stuck in traffic driving from Denver and they arrive frustrated and late for their reservation. We practice empathy because it’s our job to be understanding and take care of them no matter what has happened.
It’s also important that we are egalitarian. We have to be composed each time a guest enters the restaurant. I tellthe staff, no matter how you prepare for it, your night is going to change, and you need to roll with those changes.
During service, there are countless variables that pop up, but our job is to nimbly master them and make the whole thing look easy. It’s a 24-hour job compressed into a six-hour dinner service.
What am I most proud of in 10 years at Frasca? The community that has developed within the walls of our restaurant and beyond. We have provided continuous on-the-job education that creates, fosters and celebrates great hospitality in Boulder, Denver and far beyond. For me, working side-by-side for a decade with such a dedicated, thoughtful and engaged staff has been a privilege.
Bobby Stuckey and Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson opened Frasca Food & Wine
in August 2004. The name was inspired by the Italian frascas (casual gathering spots for farmers, friends and families to share a meal and a bottle of wine during fall harvest) that Stuckey and Mackinnon-Patterson had visited together in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of Northeast Italy.
Frasca’s 10th anniversary
Frasca Food and Wine, 1738 Pearl St., Boulder (303-442-9699) has put together a greatest-hits menu from customer requests to celebrate its first decade. The menu will be served Aug. 4-9, subject to minor changes based on availability. Dishes include: heirloom tomato, Armenian cucumber and filone gazpacho; Emma Farms Wagyu beef, butter lettuce and anchovy salad; Berkshire pork belly and seasonal vegetables; lobster, scallop and sweet corn tagliatelle; Colorado beef short ribs; and langoustine, scallop and sea bass misto di mare. Frascafoodandwine.com
